


If I Speak for the Dead

by anneapocalypse



Series: Cesura [3]
Category: Red vs. Blue
Genre: Anger, Angst, Catharsis, Death, F/F, Femslash February, Grief/Mourning, Implied/Referenced Genocide, Post-War, Rebuilding
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-02-09
Updated: 2018-02-23
Packaged: 2019-03-14 23:15:09
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 3
Words: 8,121
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/13600497
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/anneapocalypse/pseuds/anneapocalypse
Summary: Carolina and Wash owe their lives to Chorus’s surviving mass murderer. Carolina has no idea how this knowledge will affect Kimball—or if their relationship will survive it.





	1. The Living

**Author's Note:**

> Set after Season 15, following "How We Know It's Home."
> 
> Title is taken from the poem [“Author’s Prayer” by Ilya Kaminsky](https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/53850/authors-prayer).
> 
> Kimball facecanon is from [misses-unicorn](http://misses-unicorn.tumblr.com/post/95942138964/i-just-want-kimball-to-kick-felix-into-that).
> 
> Many thanks to my sweet beta reader, [tuckerfuckingdidit](http://archiveofourown.org/users/tuckerfuckingdidit)!

Kimball’s face turns to stone.

She freezes as though someone had pressed a button and locked her in place—not her armor but _her_ , the lines of her jaw and cheekbone frozen, even the sharp gaze of her dark brown eyes locked to a point that is none of them and which none of them can see.

Every other set of eyes in the room is locked on her.

She doesn’t repeat the name back. Doesn’t ask for confirmation, like she might’ve heard wrong the first time.

On the other side of Vanessa, out of focus, Carolina can still feel the dismay radiating off Wash, that sometimes-unfortunate impulse he gets to say _something_ just to diffuse the tension in the room. Sometimes it works. Sometimes it doesn’t.

For the moment, though, Wash can’t speak. It’s his room they’re in, at General Donald D. Doyle General Hospital—General General, in Chorusan shorthand. It’s still a little hard to look at him. The bandages on his neck, everything that brings up. It was so much less bad than it could’ve been. The bullet missed his spine. The bleeding’s what would’ve killed him, save for the speed and stealth capabilities of the prowler _A'rynasea_ , gliding through the First Fleet’s blind spots like a shadow.

He’s on a feeding tube and isn’t supposed to talk yet, but Dr. Grey’s said he’ll make a full recovery and should regain his speech with no problem. The doctor’s blithe pronouncements about the ease of the reconstructive surgery following laryngeal trauma— _boring_ was the word she used—confirmed some things Carolina had long suspected about the quality of care Maine received aboard the _Mother of Invention_. She figures that thought hasn’t escaped Wash either, with not much to do but sit and think while the regen stims and pain meds do their work. She hasn’t brought it up, or let herself sink into that old anger with no available target. When Wash can talk again, maybe then. For now, she just needs to stay focused on the fact that he’s alive.

They both are.

That this is thanks to someone whose name still lands like a shot fired, stops a room dead like time itself has frozen—she hasn’t wanted to think too hard about that, either.

Now, watching Kimball’s face as the truth lands, Carolina wishes she’d let herself think about it before now.

 

She shoots a glance at Tucker. His gaze is low, not at Kimball but at some point on the floor. Eyes narrowed, mouth set in a hard line. His hair is just long enough now for a ponytail, dark brown locs tipped with aquamarine, and with his hair pulled back the tension in his jawline is visible from where Carolina stands. His fists are clenched tight but the look on his face—

He almost looks like he wants to _cry_.

Kimball is silent for a long moment. Too long.

“I see,” she says finally, and it feels like nothing, like a sound to fill the silence because there’s nothing else to say.

“We have his number,” Dr. Grey pipes up from the doorway, datapad in hand, startling all three of them—Carolina is honestly not sure just how long she’s been there. “His vehicle ID.” She titters. “Wasn’t hard to break through that cloaking device of his, and I was just so goshdarn curious! Figured I might have the time to look up who it was registered to later!” She laughs, and the sound grates down Carolina’s spine, echoing off the hospital’s bright walls. “You all just saved me the trouble! Anyway, the ID might make it possible to track him and—”

“No.”

All eyes in the room turn to the President.

“No,” Kimball says again, more firmly this time. “We are not wasting one single credit of Chorus’s resources on a galaxy-wide manhunt. I will not allow it.” She enunciates every syllable, an edge to her voice that could cut glass. “We have a society to rebuild, and that work is far from finished. Our efforts will remain focused _here_.”

Her eyes shift to Tucker, to Wash, and then to Carolina.

“He saved you,” Kimball says, her voice softening ever so slightly, and for a moment her gazes fixes on Carolina so intently that Carolina wants to look away, “and for that, we will grant him this one reprieve: he will not be hunted.” She swallows. “But if he _ever_ shows his face in this system again, I will see him apprehended, and tried, and convicted for his crimes against Chorus.” She inhales sharply. Exhales.

“Thank you for telling me,” she adds, and it feels absurd, somehow. She lays a hand, not on Wash’s shoulder but on the raised corner of his hospital bed vaguely near his shoulder. “I’m glad you’re feeling better, Wash. Rest up and recover.”

Carolina wants to say something, god only knows what, something to make this all less terrible, but before she can come up with anything, Kimball has already squared her shoulders and walked out of the room, leaving the four of them in an awful silence.

Tucker breaks it first. Not with words but with a frustrated sigh, as he drops into the chair in the corner and drops his face into his hands.

The urge to _do something_ is almost overwhelming at this point, and Dr. Grey in typical fashion has slipped away to something less awkward and more interesting, and Wash is staring at Tucker with a helpless kind of distress, still unable to speak. So it’s pretty much down to her.

She takes a seat in the chair next to Tucker and puts a hand on his shoulder.

Tucker drags his hands down his face and sighs again, resting both elbows on his knees, staring at the floor. “Son of a _bitch_. Can everything just… not fucking suck for one day? Is that too much to ask?”

Damn if she doesn’t wish she had an answer for that one.

But Carolina can’t stop remembering the look in his eyes when Kimball went silent, the way his gaze slid to the floor and his jaw tightened and god, she knows that look.

She knows what it feels like wearing that look.

“It’s _not_ your fault, Tucker,” she says finally.

Tucker snorts.

“It’s _not_.” Carolina grasps for the words, and her hand is starting to feel conspicuous and out of place so she moves it off his shoulder and then wishes she hadn’t. “You would’ve figured something out. If he hadn’t shown up. I _know_ you would’ve found us. We all would’ve made it out, we _always_ do.”

 _Not all of us._ No one says it, but it’s there. If Caboose were here, he would’ve said it. Enough of a reason to be grateful he’s not, and yet for no good reason Carolina wishes he was.

A wave from Wash gets their attention, and when they both look up he’s holding up his datapad, on which he’s typed, _Listen to her. She’s right._

“Thanks,” Tucker says, a little flatly, and she can tell he doesn’t believe her, doesn’t believe either of them, and how can he.

He’ll never have the chance to know. None of them will.

She means it, though.

 

She barely sees Vanessa for the rest of the week and for the first couple of days Carolina tells herself it’s normal. As much as anything is normal.

She has her strength back, and she’s back to getting up before dawn for an early run, settling into a daily route that takes her downtown to the hospital to visit Wash before the rest of her day begins. Without fail, he’s awake and already bored by the time she arrives, and she can see the lift in his face and the relief in his eyes when she enters his hospital room at a half-jog. She stretches while they chat—well, she chats, filling the quiet with as much news and gossip and small talk as she can dredge up, and Wash responds on his datapad as quick as his fingers can type.

She texts on her way out of the hospital, because Vanessa is always up by then, but when she offers to pick her up a tea along with her own coffee and swing by, there’s a long delay before the text back: _don’t worry about me today._ _i’ll be in session all morning. it’ll just get cold._

After breakfast it’s off to training, building her own routine back up and sparring a few rounds with Caboose and with Tucker, who doesn’t complain nearly as much as he used to. She wonders if Wash said something to him about keeping in shape, then she realizes Wash didn’t have to.

 

Afternoons are for work. Carolina’s had to stop herself from signing on with multiple co-ops at once—it’s been like high school and college all over again, with every extracurricular in sight calling her name. Rationally, she knows one is more than enough to keep her days full, but the temptation to overextend is strong, not least because it’s so much easier to work than to leave herself time to think.

She could’ve joined any of the hundreds of work cooperatives sprung up in and around the new capital in the year since the war’s end. City planning, transportation, sanitation, education, housing, arts and archiving, environmental clean-up and conservation, food production and distribution, and the list goes on, each cooperative divided into dozens of subgroups, handling more specific tasks, or different areas of the city and surrounding region.

The most obvious pull of them all was the planetary militia. Strictly voluntary, Vanessa had told her, but still a necessity—they could not ignore the risk of pirates and Charon stragglers still hidden around the planet, or of outside invaders either.

Of course Chorus could never stand alone against the First Fleet, and a violent clash with the UNSC was to be avoided at all costs. Even if they’d had the ships and the ordnance, which they hadn’t, there simply weren’t enough of them left. They had not driven Hargrove’s forces from their soil and blown his mercenary conscripts sky high only to invite the UNSC in to finish the job. But they could defend themselves against lesser threats, and they would.

Vanessa made her the offer. A training position, a command, whatever she wanted. Troops would get in line to serve under the legendary Agent Carolina. Before Hargrove’s capture and Chorus’s victory, her Aqua Squad had earned their reputation as the finest of the United Chorus Army. And before the year away, before the moon and the blockade and Temple, Carolina probably would’ve accepted the offer without hesitation.

 

The Double H building hits you with a wet, sort of pond-like smell when you first walk in. Not quite unlike the old reservoir in the rebel base, Vanessa’s thinking spot. To Carolina it’s pungent, strong and alive. Being in armor all the time, you get used to smells being dampened by your air filters. Since coming back to Chorus, Carolina finds herself spending a lot of time out of armor, savoring the sensation of air on her skin, the windy breath of the living city and the organic smell that hits her when she walks into Harmony Hydroponics.

It’s a ridiculous choice and Carolina knows that—she’s never had a green thumb, hasn’t kept so much as a single houseplant of her own since college. (A cactus. It died.) When she talked to Jensen about joining, she joked nervously that for all she knew she might kill anything she touched.

“Oh, it’s easier than you think,” Katie had assured her sincerely. “It’s all science, all formulas.” The young lieutenant-turned-botanist looked more in her element than Carolina had ever seen, dressed in a salvaged and slightly-too-large for her lab coat, walking the rows of bright steel tables and white PVC pipe and vibrant green leaves.

Katie was too nice to say it but what she really meant was all the heavy brainwork’s done at the top, by herself and the other sciencey types. What they need is people to help with the legwork, mixing and administering the nutrient solutions, keeping pipes and trays and tables and the various other hardware clean, moving heavy things around. Carolina comes in after lunch, clocks in on her datapad and downloads the daily task sheet and sets quietly to work. There are plenty of others working around the facility, but she mostly keeps to herself, wears her earbuds while she works. Something calming about the solitude and repetitive tasks, and all around her the bright green of things growing and alive.

Maybe she’ll get bored with it in a month and switch to another co-op—it’s not like anyone wouldn’t take her.

But it’s kind of interesting, actually, and she’s managed not to kill anything yet.

 

When she doesn’t hear from Vanessa for the rest of the day, she sends her usual good night text before packing it in. She doesn’t hear her COM pad chirp, but the next morning she finds a _sleep well_ and a moon emoji sent sometime after midnight.

And it goes like that the next day, and the next.

Vanessa Kimball is the President of an entire planet, what’s left of it. She’s busy.

But by the fourth or fifth day it starts to feel like more than that.


	2. The Dead

Maybe it’s her own fault, for not biting the bullet and telling Vanessa the whole story sooner. She always does this—puts off the hard part, the _talking_ , until something forces it out of her. How many times is she going to fucking do this. How many times until she _learns_ , this is how you drive people away. This is why people don’t stay.

There’s just so much. It’s so much.

There’s a lot she still hasn’t told Vanessa at all.

 

She hasn’t told Vanessa about what she did before they returned to Chorus. What she would’ve done alone except that Tucker insisted on helping, and Caboose wouldn’t be left behind—and with his strength, it was probably for the best. The Reds all said it sounded like Blue Team problems and bowed out. Carolina neither blamed them nor minded their absence. She needed this to be a quieter mission anyway.

They could easily have left it to the Section Zero response teams to handle. After all, everything came out in their debrief back in Sydney. Temple’s intentions, the device, the box canyon on Armada 8 and the long twisting tunnel under Blue Base that led to the underwater lair, its deepest chamber accessible only by a single elevator.

In what Wash would probably assure her was “typical ONI bullshit,” Section Zero was primarily concerned with Temple’s actions on Earth, of which there was ample and easily-gatherable evidence. It was for that, for an act of attempted terrorism, that Mark Temple and his accomplices would be tried and convicted and locked up and the key thrown away. Open and shut. Project Freelancer and other late-wartime military disasters were finally fading from the public consciousness, and the Office of Naval Intelligence was eager to keep it that way. What Temple had done to them and ten other former Freelancers would never see the inside of a courtroom.

This crime scene wasn’t a priority.

 

Vanessa knows the basics of what happened but not the details, not the shape of that hidden room, or how she knows it was soundproof because she and Wash spent the first six hours of their captivity taking turns yelling themselves hoarse, just in case someone above might hear. Temple’s trophy room jammed all radio communications but couldn’t disable their helmet loudspeakers.

He probably wouldn’t have wanted to anyway. For the time it took him to walk the narrow corridor back to the elevator, he probably enjoyed hearing them scream.

 

She felt the chill crawl down her spine the instant the lift door opened and they stepped out into that corridor. No windows down here, no clear walls giving view to fish and undersea flora outside. She felt for a moment like she was drowning, like she was trapped all over again, her limbs immobilized and cramping, a crushing terror in her chest.

She felt Tucker’s hand on her shoulder, and with it a sudden rush of relief that she hadn’t come alone.

“It is okay, Agent Carolina,” Caboose said brightly, breaking the mausoleum-silence of the room, “because we are here with you and the bad people are in jail and no one is going to hurt you because Freckles will kill them if they do. And also everyone here is sleeping I think.”

“Caboose,” Tucker said sharply, warningly.

“It’s okay,” she said quickly, steeling herself. Shoulders back, spine straight, chin up. They had come here on a mission, and she would see it completed. _Come on, Carolina. Lock it down._

“Thanks, Caboose,” she added, and saw Tucker relax a little.

“We’ve got a job to do,” she said, her voice turning to steel. “Let’s get it done.”

 

Temple’s ten were just the way they had left them, crumpled on the floor in awkward and unnatural positions. The armor lock override had released every suit in the room at once, and when their armor had unlocked and she and Wash had collapsed to the floor, every body in the room had collapsed with them.

A sticky, half-evaporated patch of liquid had pooled around the shattered bottle fallen from the hand of Agent Illinois. Illinois, frozen just behind her and out of her field of vision, so that she hadn’t had a chance to notice what was in his outstretched hand. Illinois, who unlike the rest of them, had not drawn a weapon or assumed a fighting stance.

Illinois, who had died offering his killer a fucking drink.

 

They laid each body out flat, and then, from the override panel by the door, re-engaged the armor lock. Easier to move them that way.

Carolina didn’t remove a single helmet, and kept a sharp eye on Tucker and Caboose to make sure neither of them got too curious. She’d seen enough horrors on the battlefield, teammates gutted and screaming, faces seared off by plasma and limbs shattered by sticky grenades and whole squadrons melted against the glassy surface of a soon-to-be-dead planet. The state of decay after weeks and months inside a sealed undersuit (or, in some cases, not so well sealed, if the smell was any indication) was not something she needed to see. Not something Tucker and Caboose needed to see, either.

The bodies would be taken to some classified location for autopsy (where that was still possible) and their armor entered into evidence and the chances of any actual remains being returned to their families was somewhere between slim and none. At least they would probably notify next of kin. Carolina could live with that. You had to. Her mother had left no body to send home, every atom of her vaporized by Covenant plasma and scattered to space.

 _We all come from stars_ , her mother had told her when she was little. _And sooner or later, we’ll all be stars again._

She could, at the very least, give the dead a moment of respect before they too became _protected, classified military property_ and disappeared forever into the black hole of Section Zero.

 

“This one doesn’t look like a Freelancer,” Tucker said.

“What's a Freelancer look like?” Carolina said wearily, as they laid the last body on the concrete floor of Blue Base. Ten Freelancers all in a row.

“I dunno, scary? Badass?” Tucker nodded at the body they’d just laid down. “I mean, look at him. His helmet’s a _fish_.”

“Whales are not fishes,” Caboose objected.

“Whatever.”

“I like whales.”

“Shut up, Caboose.”

“I would like a whale helmet.”

“Shut _up_ , Caboose.”

“It’s a custom job,” Carolina said. “They don’t come like that.”

“So he _wanted_ to look like a total geek?”

 _He was a Beta,_ Carolina didn’t say, but thought, almost automatically. Like that still _meant_ anything, the way she used to classify people in her head with a glance. There hadn't been many Betas she'd considered  _Alpha material,_ never mind  _competition_. There were exceptions, sometimes—Wash was fumbly under pressure, didn’t think well on his feet, but he was a crack shot and his combat scores alone would have him bumped up to Alpha sooner or later. She’d called it. She was usually right about those things.

Illinois wasn’t _competition_. Less so than most Betas, even—not because he wasn’t good, but because he was _content_ as a Beta. Not watching the Alphas like most of them did, waiting for a washout, an equipment failure, some fuck-up to open a spot they could climb into.

 _Unambitious_ , she’d thought back then. Shame, because he was pretty good. Could’ve gone places if he wanted to.

And in the end, well. He did go places. A beachside cabana with a bar full of spiced rum. He got out. Made a home and a new life. Survived.

Until he didn’t.

Tucker peered at the domed orange-gold visor. “Was he a badass, though?”

Carolina followed his gaze, like the triad emblem textured over and over into Illinois’s visor might, somehow, tell her something new. It didn’t, of course. She didn’t even know his name.

She didn’t know him. Not really.

“Yeah,” Carolina said. “He was.”

 

With the bodies all moved topside and the response team incoming for pick-up and transport, Carolina sent Tucker and Caboose to prep their own vehicle, and headed back down alone. One last time.

Somehow she’d gotten it in her head that the room was circular, but it wasn’t. Square, actually, with dark gray walls that seemed to recede into shadow, the center of the room brightly lit from overhead. It was the circle painted on the floor, dark blue on gray, that had gotten her mixed up. That shape stuck in her head, confused.

Empty now. A single air vent in the ceiling, a single corridor heading to the elevator. Clean, but for that spilled rum and some sticky tracks the shape of Caboose's boots. Not a single drop of blood. You’d never know.

Temple did it the only way he could have. He could never have bested even a Delta in one-to-one combat. Even the worst of them were still Freelancers, and he was—

_He was just a sim trooper._

She kept her helmet on, knowing the lingering stench would be even worse without her air filter, and she thought about just screaming. At the top of her lungs until her voice gave out. No one would hear. She’d been thinking about it since they arrived. Just couldn’t do it with all the bodies still here. Or in front of Tucker and Caboose.

Or Wash.

For every hour they’d spent stuck in armor lock together, she had managed not to just start screaming hysterically and incoherently.

For Wash.

And now she couldn’t. Not in the empty, silent room with its dead carried away. Didn’t expect that. The whole time she had felt it clawing at her insides, wanting to get out. And at the moment when she could, finally, have let it out—

Now she couldn’t. It shrank up in her gut, not gone but deflated, curled in on itself too tight to be released.

She drew in a breath and let it out, and couldn’t find anything inside her worth breaking the silence for.

 

By the fifth day, when she doesn’t text Vanessa in the morning and Vanessa doesn’t text her all day, she knows something is actually wrong.

Maybe this is how they break up, finally. Carolina would be lying if she said she hadn’t been over about a hundred ways it could happen, in her head. Because good things don’t last. Not for ex-Freelancers. Not for people like her and Wash.

Like Tucker puts it, it’d be nice if things could just not fucking suck all the time but that’s not how it goes, and Vanessa from day one has felt too good to be true and more than Carolina deserves and when that train of thought gets going in her head, it’s hard to get off it. Even the repetitive work at Double H stops being soothing and becomes the background rhythm to that chorus of pessimism in her head: _This is it. This is it. It’s over. You’re done._

She spends about another day and a half catastrophizing before she pulls herself together, and sends a text.

 

_can i swing by tonight or tomorrow? okay to say no._

She half-expects the text to go unanswered, but Vanessa’s reply comes within ten minutes. _tonight is good. should be home after ten._

 

Beyond the guarded front entrance, there’s no substantial difference between Vanessa’s building and any other downtown apartment complex. Kimball has been staunchly against any kind of fancy upscale housing for elected officials. She chose her home simply for its convenient proximity to the capitol building, itself no more than a repurposed office complex, colony-modern, simple titanium and glass that blends in with every other building in downtown Nova Armonia.

Vanessa answers the door in civilian clothes, not armor, looking like she’s just come from some kind of diplomatic meeting. She’s in navy blue slacks and a white button-down shirt and Carolina’s eyes go immediately to where the shirt lies unbuttoned to her breastbone, exposing a V of light brown skin. Her belt is off, her shirt partly untucked in the front, like she’d been about to get undressed when she heard the door. Deep shadows sit under her eyes.

“Carolina,” Vanessa says, softer then she expects. “Come in.”

“Hey,” Carolina says, and steps inside.

“I’m sorry, I know I’ve been been—”

“Sorry, I know this probably isn’t—

They both start talking at once, stumble over each other’s words and shut up at the same time.

“Are—you okay?” Carolina says, haltingly.

Vanessa lets a breath out. “Yeah. It’s—it’s been a heavy week but I should’ve texted you, I’m sorry. I needed some time to… sort things out. I should’ve told you.”

“It’s okay.”

“It’s not. Not really. I—” Vanessa looks at her, a look of such helpless sadness in her deep brown eyes that Carolina’s reassurances die on her tongue.

She says instead, “Can I do anything?”

Vanessa looks away for a moment, brow furrowing. It’s a no, Carolina thinks, feeling that sort of stony inevitability settle in her stomach. It’s _the_ no. This is it, then. This is what they can’t get past. The tail end of a civil war, the misunderstandings and mismatched expectations, ten months spent long distance and this, finally—her owing her life to the surviving butcher of Chorus—is what Vanessa can’t live with. She’ll try not to be angry. They’ve both seen hell and worse. Who’s she to tell someone else what they can live with.

“This weekend,” Vanessa says. “Council’s in recess for a few days, and I want to go somewhere. Are you free?”

Carolina blinks, several times, before it sinks in that Vanessa is _not_  dumping her.

“Yeah,” she says, too bewildered to ask any more questions. “Yeah, I’m free.”

“It’s not exactly a pleasure trip.”

“That’s fine.”

“But it’d be just the two of us. Somewhere I—something I need to do.”

“Whatever you need,” Carolina says, heavy with relief. _Just tell me to do something. Anything. Please._

 

It’s just a day trip, but Carolina packs the Warthog for overnight anyway, because well. You never know. It’s not much—she’s wearing her armor and Vanessa will be too—she still does mostly, even in the city and it’s safer to go armored out into the wilderness. Just the two of them. If Kimball thinks that she doesn’t need a bodyguard with Carolina at her side, she doesn’t say so outright. There’s something gratifying about it all the same.

 

Carolina drives. She’s always felt more comfortable behind the wheel, and when she pulls up to the curb, Vanessa climbs into the passenger seat without protest. The sight turns a few heads. Civilian vehicles, or at least repurposed military vehicles stripped down enough to _look_ vaguely civilian, have become common enough in the past year that Carolina’s Warthog looks pretty ostentatious in downtown, pulling away from the President’s apartment building. She can’t say she minds.

Vanessa directs her out of the city to the west, and her posture relaxes a bit as they drive, as the first few hours pass with farmland stretching for kilometers on all sides. Successful farms mean a sustainable food supply, and that means Chorus may yet maintain its self-sufficiency. With the blockade lifted, things are less dire on that front. But imports are still pricey, in more ways than one. Any dependence on the UNSC and outside goods compromises Chorus’s sovereignty, in practical terms if not in legal ones.

They don’t talk much on the drive, which is all right. The Warthog’s a noisy vehicle and Carolina’s always liked it for pretty much that exact reason. You can talk over it if you have to, but it’s enough to make small talk feel unnecessary. Vanessa only speaks up to give the occasional direction—mostly “Keep going straight.”

She hasn’t said, but Carolina’s figured out for herself where they’re going.

They’re bearing more or less dead west on the dirt road, through field and pasture, eventually giving way to dry ground, brush and thistle and red-brown rock. The land goes flatter, and in the distance something appears on the horizon, a line of _something_ stretching far to the north and to the south, many-colored and wavering in the midday light.

In the past year, Carolina knows, the road they now travel has been cut into the ground, unmarked and unpaved, by nothing more than repeat travel. It’s a kind of pilgrimage, maybe. Cutting a path straight as the crow flies from Chorus’s new capital, the hub of life and rebirth and arguing over the future they almost didn’t have—out past the fields bearing hope for that future free from outside intervention. All the way out to the long stretch of chain link fence topped with barbed wire and punctuated with red and yellow warning signs. The fence has become a kind of memorial wall, and as it comes into view Carolina can see it covered with mementos, stretching for kilometers in either direction.

There are flowers—wild, not cultivated, and precious in the new economy more concerned with food production than with decoration. Thistley-looking bunches of purple flowers, tiny blossoms in white and yellow and fiery red, delicate blue flowers that look like forget-me-nots, all stuffed between the links of the fence and wilted in the sun. There are personal items—stuffed animals, trinkets, articles of clothing. A yellow straw sun hat with a rust colored shadow on one side sits askew atop one of the fence posts. A locket hung from the chainlink glitters in the sun. Helmets, rifles, and miscellaneous pieces of armor are common too, hung from the fence or leaned against it. And tucked between the links, rolled pieces of paper, hundreds and thousands of them. Letters to the dead. Prayers, probably. Sometimes just names, when there is nothing else to leave.

Carolina knows about this place because Katie told her about it. Because she and the other Lieutenants had all taken a trip out here together, to leave things for lost friends.

The fence marks the last safe distance from the old capital—the edge of the Armonia Exclusion Zone.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> The final chapter will be posted on Friday, February 23rd. :)
> 
> Thanks so much for reading!


	3. The Edge

Vanessa gets out of the vehicle slowly, twisting her armored torso one way and the other to stretch her back. A moment later she takes off her helmet. It’s safe out here—the fence is placed far enough back from the fallout. They knew people would come here, Carolina thinks. Do exactly this.

Vanessa walks directly up to the fence, and puts her hand to the chainlink where the links just barely show through. A piece of blue cloth tied into the links waves in a faint breeze, brushing her knuckles.

“I haven’t been out here,” she says, low, like a confession. “It’s been a year. It’s been a year and I haven’t come.”

Carolina avoids the obvious. _You’ve been busy. You’ve been swamped. You’ve been the President. You’ve been doing your job, you've been doing the work of three and a half people at least, you’ve barely had a second to breathe never mind—_

She puts her hand on Vanessa’s shoulder, and says nothing. Vanessa looks to one side—not at Carolina but down the length of the fence. Then the other way. Taking it all in.

“You know,” Vanessa says softly, “everyone in my graduating class is dead.”

Carolina stills.

“High school, not college. There are a few left alive from the university." (The University of Armonia. Where Vanessa was in school when the war began. Now leveled to ash like everything else inside that crater.) "I went to a rural high school though, it was… small. Fifty-seven of us in my class. I knew a couple of girls older than me who survived. A few younger. But none from my class. No one I graduated with. I’m not sure how many of my teachers survived. Probably not many.”

Vanessa’s fingers curl into the chain link.

“You’re supposed to lose some people, I think. You know. Normally. People go off to war, some of them don’t come back. You’re supposed to lose grandparents. Parents. Maybe someone your age. Maybe one random tragedy. That’s normal, right? Maybe two if you’re really unlucky. Someone in your class dies maybe. Or your sister. Or your cousin. Or your best friend.”

Carolina thinks about that. Six years of military boarding school means there's a not-insubstantial chance her own first crush is dead, killed in action. Or they could be a high-ranking officer somewhere, for all Carolina knows. She knows a girl she briefly dated in college was both—held a shipboard command, died in the last year of the war. Suppose she could’ve made it back to Earth for the funeral, if she’d tried. Freelancer had collapsed some months earlier, and Carolina was busy failing at more mundane things like being a functional human being, in hiding from a father who wasn't even looking for her anyway.

Her ex died a hero. If the news made Carolina feel anything at the time, it was a faint but bitter jealousy.

She slides her hand over Vanessa’s shoulder, and realizes that at some point, that feeling lifted. It’s gone.

Vanessa’s jaw tenses, her hand tightening on the fence.

“Everyone I grew up with is dead. My mom, my lăolao, everyone I knew. The first girl I liked. The first girl I kissed. None of my friends now are people I knew five years ago. I don’t even know if they’re friends. I don’t know what friends are except people you hope don’t die. No one I loved before I was twenty-one is still alive.”

Her eyes narrow, staring into the death zone. A vein ripples beneath the triplicate of scars carved into the left side of her face.

“It’s no wonder we can’t heal. We can’t trust each other. We don’t _know_ each other. And it feels like—it feels like it’s _always_ been that way. Everyone we know _dies._ ”

She lets out a long, shuddering breath.

“They stole _everything_ from us. Even the ones who lived. We can’t know each other. We don’t know how. We don’t even know ourselves. Maybe we never will. And I have to keep going, every day, keep _trying_ because if I stop and think that maybe we’ll never heal, maybe they’re still destroying us even after they’re gone—” Vanessa screws up her face and sucks in her breath through her teeth, “I’m _scared_ , Carolina. I’m so scared. I’m scared we’ll never get there. I’m scared it’s still too late for us. I’m scared if I start thinking about everything I’m scared of I’ll just collapse on the Council room floor and start screaming and never stop.”

“Well,” Carolina says, moving closer, “if ever there was a place for it.”

Vanessa snorts a laugh, then glances at her. “You’re serious.”

Carolina shrugs. “If not here then where?”

Vanessa’s mouth opens slightly, more in question than anything. She swallows. Lets out a nervous breath of laughter.

She can’t. She doesn’t know how to let it out. Know what that feels like.

Carolina squeezes her shoulder, then drops her hand. “Okay then. Me first.”

Vanessa looks at her, and Carolina takes a deep breath and thinks about the empty room.

She thinks of the faces that flashed one by one before her eyes inside the portal. Thinks about the smug tilt of her father’s head, the terrible gleam of white on gold on white in the helmeted face that was and was not Maine. She thinks of seventy-six hours in the snow and two years of radio silence. Thinks of the sounds over COM when Felix’s blade stabbed Tucker in the gut, when Locus’s fists were beating Wash to a pulp. She thinks of that final _Hey, sis_. She remembers how it felt when her armor froze her limbs in place, when she couldn’t turn her head to see Wash at her side, when nothing but his weakening voice could tell her she wasn’t alone.

She stares into the gray-brown expanse of the Exclusion Zone, the edge of the cratered city just barely visible on the horizon. She curls her hands into fists, and she screams. She screams the way she couldn’t in the empty room with no one listening. She screams for how badly she wanted to protect Tucker and Caboose from what she and Wash went through and how she couldn’t even do that, not really. Tucker already knows too much, understands too much bad shit and Caboose, well, Caboose has his own way of making sense of things. You can’t really stop him from getting there. Just trust him to get through it his own way.

She screams, but keeps her voice, and when she stops, the silence at the fence feels more fragile. Wavery. Like catching a glimpse of active camo out of the corner of your eye. Ghosts in your peripheral vision. She wonders how many ghosts have had their names screamed out here, how many names bitten out in whispers or sobbed on knees.

Vanessa doesn’t wait for any further prompting, just steps in closer to the fence and laces both hands through the chain link and inhales deeply.

It starts out wordless, a guttural wail so sharp it cuts into Carolina’s chest like a plasma blade. Carolina wonders how long that scream has lived in her, growing. She knows how things build up that way, unseen. Like Connie's secrets, like how Maine's silence changed.

Vanessa’s scream becomes words, a string of Mandarin Carolina can’t understand, but it goes on for a long time, until at last she sinks to her knees, still clinging to the fence and wracked with sobs.

A year ago, Carolina might've stayed frozen. Not sure whether to touch or stay back. And so she'd keep back, until the moment passed and she knew, in her gut, that she should've done something, _anything,_ and it was too late. She drops to her knees now, folds her arms around Vanessa, presses up against her back as best she can with armor between them, and if Vanessa flinched, or pulled away, she would let go. But Vanessa doesn't, and so Carolina stays, holds the woman she loves—

yeah. Loves. More than she ever thought she could, so much it wants to split her open inside, so much she gets stupid and speechless and goes searching for the words anyway, because Vanessa needs them. Beautiful Vanessa full of poetry and fire, kindness and anger and grief. So much grief. More than Carolina can imagine, and she has a lot of her own.

Carolina holds her until her hands start to go numb and she wiggles her fingers and Vanessa shifts around toward her and buries her face in Carolina’s shoulder. Carolina holds her. Can still feel her shuddering with quiet sobs.

“I want him dead,” Vanessa whispers, clinging to her. “He brought you back to me, all of you, and I’m so grateful and I hate him and I want him dead. I want to cut him into pieces and throw them to the crows. And I don’t know how to put all of that together. I don’t know how.”

Carolina swallows. “Me either.”

Vanessa sniffs, and Carolina feels her hold tighten. “You don’t have to. That’s not on you.”

 _How can it not be_ , Carolina doesn’t ask, instead folding her arms tighter around Vanessa and combing fingers through her hair, cropped short at the nape of her neck. “It’s not on you either.” She presses her cheek against Vanessa’s, wet with her tears. “You don’t have to forgive him because he did one good thing.”

“I can’t even think about forgiveness,” Vanessa chokes out. “I’m still thinking about us not being dead. I’m still thinking about all the names I can’t remember and every day someone who died here is forgotten and I can’t stand it but there are enough of us still alive, I have to stay focused, I have to think about _them_ because if I don’t—if I start thinking about the dead, about _this—”_ she gestures to the fence with a sweeping hand, “—I start thinking about how many names I’ve forgotten and I can’t, I can’t remember them all and I can’t forget but I can’t remember, I can’t, I _can’t—”_

She collapses sobbing again, so hard there’s almost no sound, just her shoulders shaking violently in Carolina’s arms.

“You don’t have to forgive him,” Carolina says, more sharply this time. “Ever. You don’t have to forgive _anyone_.”

"I do," Vanessa says desperately. "I have to forgive people every day. I have to forget that we were trying to kill each other eighteen months ago and say, yes, let's compromise on the agricultural bill, we can adjust the land allotments but we need to keep the incentives. I have to spend thirty minutes being screamed at about infrastructure by a Council member who’s never picked up a hammer in his life and I have to say yes, I hear your concerns and I promise you they will be addressed in this resolution that we have already revised fifteen times and don’t have the manpower to implement as it is. And then I have to look up and see the UNSC _watching_ us, waiting for us to show a single sign of weakness or division or unrest, _any_ excuse to drop the hammer on us. And I have to look my people in the eye and tell them we can keep each other safe, after they spent ten months trying to starve us out."

That's all true, so Carolina doesn't argue, just holds Vanessa and strokes her hair.

Vanessa’s sobs quiet. She sniffs.

“Why?” Carolina says finally. “What do you do it for?”

Vanessa blinks, eyelashes fluttering wet against Carolina’s cheek. There’s a long silence as the question registers and then she whispers, hoarse, close to Carolina’s ear: "So we can live. So we can rebuild. So we can heal. So our children can have a better tomorrow."

“Right. So you _fight_ for that. Even when that means compromising. But you don’t have to forgive everyone.” Carolina swallows, holds Vanessa tight, closes her eyes and presses her temple against the smoothness of Vanessa’s hair. Remembers a pistol laid on a desk, the austere farewell to a man she could no longer call a father in any real sense. “You can’t. Sometimes you can’t.”

Vanessa doesn’t answer, but leans into her and rests her head on Carolina’s shoulder. A kind of surrender. She rests there, and Carolina holds her, stroking her hair and feeling her breathe. The only comfort she has, and an easier one than words. There aren’t any words for this anyway.

 

"Thank you," Vanessa says, stirring at last, untangling herself from Carolina and starting to get to her feet. Carolina rises too, feeling the crack in her bad knee as she rights herself. "I needed to do this. I thought I’d need to do it alone, but... I'm glad you were with me. Thank you. It means more than I can say."

She touches Carolina's face, caresses her jaw with the kind of tenderness Carolina so easily forgets, the kind that startles her into silence, the kind that can't possibly be meant for her. But it is.

"I don't blame you," she says, dark eyes meeting Carolina's. "For anything. You know that, don't you? Everything else, it's... it's not about you. I'm so glad you're alive. I'm so glad you came back to me. And I haven't said that."

Carolina cracks a smile, even as the words pull hard at something in her chest. "Pretty sure you did."

"Not enough." Vanessa leans in and kisses her, the softness of her mouth silencing any protests from Carolina. When she breaks the kiss at last, she rests there a moment with her forehead against Carolina's, fingers still warm on her jawbone. "The Reds and Blues were the best thing to happen to us, to this planet, in a very long time. But you, Agent Carolina, you are the best thing to ever happen to me."

 

They talk more on the ride back. Vanessa takes the wheel this time. She keeps her helmet off, and there’s a weary calm in her brown eyes as they get moving down the dirt road and the wind picks up in her face, ruffling up the bright blue tips of her black hair. Carolina keeps hers off too, breathes in the earthy country air as they pick up speed, rolling through the farmland once again.

And just like that an answer to another question slides quietly into place. She makes a mental note to find out who's in charge of the fallout containment co-op—she vaguely remembers that there is one, concerned primarily with preventing groundwater contamination from spreading east and affecting the farms. She'll find out about that. It'll be hard work, and dangerous, and she's strong and restless and in possession of one of the most advanced suits of radiation-shielded power armor on the planet. May as well put all that to good use. Someone has to be out there on the edge, after all, holding the line between the cratered city and that new, growing green. Between the dead, and the living.

That's something she can do.

 

“I should go visit Wash,” Vanessa says, as they enter the outskirts of the city. “How’s he doing?”

“Doing well. Bored, mostly. They should be able to discharge him next week.”

“Good to hear.” Vanessa shoots a glance at her. “And Tucker? How’s he holding up?”

“He’s… had a hard time,” Carolina says, cautiously. “He blames himself, I think. For not figuring it all out himself. For not being the one who found us.”

Vanessa looks at her again, concern startled across her face. “He doesn’t think _I_ blame him for…?”

Carolina avoids the reassuring lie, and says instead, “I think it would be good for him to hear it from you. He’s been… struggling. And he looks up to you a lot.”

There’s a warmth in Vanessa’s cheeks that says that means something to her.

“I’ll talk to him,” she says. “This week. We’ll get coffee. I’ll make the time.”

 

It’s creeping toward evening by the time they reach Vanessa’s building, and Carolina’s stomach has started to growl on the trip back. Vanessa parks the Warthog on the street, and reaches over to take Carolina’s hand. “Come inside? We can get takeout, if you want. There’s an amazing Indian place a block away that just started delivering.”

“Spicy?”

Vanessa winks. “You know it.”

“Sounds great.” Carolina gives her hand a squeeze before letting go, and climbs out of the hog to join Vanessa on the sidewalk. The door guards nod to Kimball as they pass.

“Honestly, if you feel like staying over… I wouldn’t mind,” Vanessa says, a little hesitantly. “It’d be good not to be alone tonight.”

It would be good. More time to talk, too. The hard part. But needed. Like Vanessa’s trip out to the edge. There’s a lot they need to catch up on. A lot of things Carolina needs to say. Maybe she’s ready to get it all out. At least to try.

“Same here,” she says, and follows Vanessa inside.

END

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Thanks so much for coming along on this ride with me. :) Comments and concrit are welcome; I'd love to hear what you thought.
> 
> I've also made a playlist for Carolina and Kimball's relationship post-season 13, which you can find on [youtube](https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLZjP-9wCx51sqhTytFDZX6zq0OpzyMy1M) and [spotify](https://open.spotify.com/user/anneapocalypse/playlist/0D9etw6PUiRTw5l1iNAKKK) if you're interested.
> 
> Happy Femslash February!


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